Life Technologies, The Translation Genomics Research Institute (TGen), and US Oncology are teaming up on a breast cancer sequencing initiative. They hope that the results will help guide decisions about which form of targeted cancer therapy is best for individual patients.

Cells may not have a mouth, but they still need to ingest substances from the external environment. If this process -- known as endocytosis -- is affected, it can lead to infectious diseases or cardio-vascular diseases, cancer, Huntington's and diabetes.

A Chinese-led team including international researchers with a scientist from Cardiff University, has shed new light on some of the giant panda's unusual biological traits, including its famously restricted diet. The team has successfully sequenced the panda genome for the first time and now, the genetic insights gleaned from the work may aid conservation efforts for the endangered species.

A further step has been taken towards our understanding of natural selection. CNRS scientists working at the Institut de Biologie of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (CNRS/ENS/INSERM) have shown that humans, and some of their primate cousins, have a common genetic footprint, i.e. a set of genes which natural selection has often tended to act upon during the past 200,000 years.

Like homing in to an elusive radio frequency in a busy city, human embryonic stem cells must sort through a seemingly endless number of options to settle on the specific genetic message, or station, that instructs them to become more-specialized cells in the body (Easy Listening, maybe, for skin cells, and Techno for neurons?). Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that this tuning process is accomplished in part by restricting the number of messages, called transcripts, produced from each gene.

Researchers, based in Ireland and Britain, have found the complete mitochondrial DNA genome sequence of ancient wild cattle using a sample from a 6,700 year-old bone. They assembled the mitochondrial DNA sequence from the well-preserved foreleg bone of an aurochs, originally discovered in a cave in Derbyshire. The team's findings are published in this latest issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

A rare, ancient polar bear fossil discovered in Norway in 2004 is yielding a treasure trove of essential information about the age and evolutionary origins of the species whose future is now seen as synonymous with the devastation wrought by climate change.